


The Quiet With Him In It

by A_Candle_For_Sherlock



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Domesticity, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 03:37:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6938167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Candle_For_Sherlock/pseuds/A_Candle_For_Sherlock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The silence in John's bedsit had been haunted by voices--Harry's and James' and those of friends he'd left behind. But now, at home in front of the fire with a sleeping, beautiful, mad genius, the silence is different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quiet With Him In It

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Спокойствие рядом с ним](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12615132) by [Little_Unicorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Little_Unicorn/pseuds/Little_Unicorn)



By the time John reaches home, he’s chilled through and vibrating with frustration. Walking home through the growing dark in a dismally frigid downpour was bad enough. Having shrugged off Sherlock’s warning that the weather would turn foul was worse. If Sherlock dares laugh at him about it--He’s shivering and the bags of shopping have been strangling the skin of his hands for twenty minutes and he is not in the mood--

He pushes open the door of the sitting room, and light and warmth pours out into the darkened hall with the smokey sweet-pine scent of the roaring hearth. Sherlock must have built the fire up before the storm hit. John steps into the glow of the room and drops the bags of groceries by the door, breathing in the sense of safely home; strips off his dripping coat and unties his sodden shoes clumsily, his fingers stiff with cold. Their battered teapot sits steaming, waiting for him beside his old RAMC mug on the table, set down perilously close to a Petri dish spread with an unknown murky substance. Sherlock's sunk low into his old armchair by the hearth, eyes closed, his mouth fallen open. He’s sound asleep.

John takes the shopping into the kitchen. The chill of the floor curls his toes as he stows the fruit and ham and milk in the fridge, the bread and jam in the cupboard, and goes for a shower. Twenty minutes later, damp and steaming and wrapped in a soft, worn robe, he pours out a cup of fragrant tea and settles slowly into his chair.

The heat of the fire sinks into his skin. The frustrations of the day are drifting off of him into the stillness of the room. There’s a long, whistling breath from Sherlock, then another, and a small snort, and John smiles. He’s never told Sherlock that he snores when he drops off in his chair like this. He’d never let his guard down long enough to do it again if he knew. The man is surprisingly private for someone so shameless.

He thinks, I can bear the quiet when he’s in it.

The silence of his bedsit had been airless and haunted with voices--the shouts of his rugby teammates as he plowed over the pitch, Harry’s rough sobs over the phone on the night she’d left Clara, James Sholto’s commands and his quiet praise. His father’s drunken shouting, his mum crying helplessly. The lone sound of a dog barking in an Afghan market, newly razed and smoking, the air thick with the smell of scorched skin.

Here, in front of the fire, the silence is full of the echoes of endless nights of arguing and laughter and music. Sherlock’s hands lie soft and open on his lap, and John sees in his mind how he’d swayed with the melody as he'd played last night, all the energy of his ferocious, tender soul flowing through his arms and slender fingers and his bow into the singing strings of his violin. John had watched his face changing with the moods of the music, thinking, If there is one thing in my life I am proud of without reservation, it is him.

He hadn’t chosen the life he’d been given. It had come after he’d thought everything that mattered was already over. The life before that he’d built for himself, echoing with soldiers’ laughter and their anger; men shouting along to the thin sound of familiar songs on a cheap secondhand radio; the sudden spurts of gunfire, the barked orders of officers with no breath to spare as they surged forward through the desert scrub, the deceptive quiet before the planes roared overhead toward their targets, the rustle of cards played and books read and letters written in the bunks through the night into the hours before dawn by men afraid to fall asleep and dream. That life had been full of the limp, loose exhaustion of waiting endlessly for orders and the sickening tug of fear when they came. Long, airless days in a low canvas tent rubbing stinging sweat from his eyes as he worked, the desert heat loosening his joints and baking his bones. The exhilaration of a completed operation, a life saved, the quiet comfort of a broken man sleeping peacefully after the analgesics soaked into his brain at last. The certainty that he was absolutely necessary to the men he lived with, laughed with, shouted at, saluted. That everything he did meant something, even if he wasn’t sure they should have been there to begin with. But since they were, he would be ready, calm, contained, able to quiet a man with a look, with his voice, with the certainty of his hands. He would be there as long as they needed him.

Until he couldn’t be. Until he was the one broken and helpless, sinking under the waves of pain into a place without time. When he’d surfaced in an unknown hospital, they’d all been gone. Every man he’d saved, every face he’d known. The nurses had been kind.

The flight back to England had been like a death. He should have had a sense of coming home. He should have felt relief. He’d felt nothing at all.

Sherlock sighs in his sleep and his lip lifts in momentary dreamy disdain and John laughs silently, thinking of the morning they’d met; of his posh voice droning, “Afghanistan or Iraq?” as he took in everything of John at a glance, observing the damage without embarrassment or pity, seeing the possibilities John had thought were lost to him. His arrogance and the contradictory sweetness of his smile. His mad, terrifying, glorious mind that had drawn John in before he’d known what was happening; the sense that he’d come suddenly awake, awake and focused in a way he’d forgotten he could be. The invitation to be necessary, to be dangerous. The slowly dawning realization that if he did nothing for the rest of his days except keep this man safe and be swept along in the mayhem that followed him, he would be satisfied. He watches the firelight play over Sherlock’s face, the dark delicacy of his brows and lashes, the soft curves of his open mouth, his curly head tipped back, defenseless. The long easy lines of him, his bare feet laid out carelessly on the rug.

Sherlock snorts and blinks himself awake. His face is covered in the confusion of sleep. “You’re home.”

John reaches out and takes Sherlock’s lean hands in his own. Rubs his thumb gently over the worn shine of Sherlock’s white-gold ring. Sherlock's eyes grow warm, the lines around them deepening as he raises their clasped fingers to his lips. The light of the hearth glows in the impossible colors of his eyes, the silver of his hair. He kisses John’s knuckles slowly, surely. “Husband.”

“Hello, love,” John answers softly. The wind roars around the house as the night deepens over Sussex. The sound of rain on the roof wraps the room in a tumultuous peace.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Credit goes to mistyzeo for making my tenses consistent, my setting explicable and my phrasing a little smoother.


End file.
